This invention generally relates to a learning system and method for teacher load balancing and more particularly to a teacher load balancing system and method that is implemented over a network, such as the Internet.
In some conventional computer-assisted educational systems, teachers do not take active roles in educating students and computer programs or agents that are not as creative and responsive to student needs take the place of the teachers in conducting educational sessions. Further, in these systems, valid concerns have been raised by educators and parents as to whether right teachers are matched with right students and right number of students are procedures that are very time consuming and are ineffective in matching right students with right teachers. Many systems lack means to forecast whether enough teachers have been assigned at a particular time ahead for carrying out educational sessions. Lack of an effective assignment process in education systems have been a stumbling block to many in delivering cost-effective quality education to students.
There has been a long sought desire in the education community to develop a cost-effective computer-assisted educational system where teachers interact with students directly to give creative and direct responses to student needs and an efficient assignment process to match right teachers to right students and assign right number of student to each teacher. Further, there has been a need to develop a system that forecasts whether enough teachers have been assigned at a particular time ahead to carry out educational sessions.
Briefly, according to the present invention, a learning system includes a plurality of teacher stations and a plurality of student stations for holding a number of learning sessions between teachers and students. A database that stores one or more teacher attributes of a pool of teachers, and a teacher selection controller coupled to the database retrieves a teacher attribute. The teacher selection controller selects the teacher from the pool of teachers to hold one or more of said learning sessions based on at least one retrieved teacher attribute.